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Leisure and curiosity might soon make great advances in useful knowledge, were they not diverted by minute emulation and laborious trifles.

Samuel Johnson

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Samuel Johnson
Age: 75 †
Born: 1709
Born: September 18
Died: 1784
Died: December 13
Biographer
Bookseller
Essayist
Lexicographer
Linguist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Poet
Politician
Teacher
Translator
Writer
Lichfield
Staffordshire
Dr Johnson
Dr. Johnson
Great Moralist
Make
Useful
Minute
Curiosity
Diverted
Soon
Laborious
Minutes
Emulation
Knowledge
Trifles
Might
Advances
Great
Leisure

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Pleasure that is obtained by unreasonable and unsuitable cost must always end in pain.
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Those that have done nothing in life, are not qualified to judge of those that have done little
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A writer who obtains his full purpose loses himself in his own lustre.
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Sir, I do not call a gamester a dishonest man but I call him an unsociable man, an unprofitable man. Gaming is a mode of transferring property without producing any intermediate good.
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It is more from carelessness about truth than from intentionally lying that there is so much falsehood in the world.
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The labor of rising from the ground will be great, ... but as we mount higher, the earth's attraction, and the body's gravity, will be gradually diminished till we arrive at a region where the man will float in the air without any tendency to fall.
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The mental disease of the present generation is impatience of study, contempt of the great masters of ancient wisdom, and a disposition to rely wholly upon unassisted genius and natural sagacity.
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Misery is caused for the most part, not by a heavy crush of disaster, but by the corrosion of less visible evils, which canker enjoyment, and undermine security. The visit of an invader is necessarily rare, but domestic animosities allow no cessation.
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You cannot spend money in luxury without doing good to the poor. Nay, you do more good to them by spending it in luxury, than by giving it for by spending it in luxury, you make them exert industry, whereas by giving it, you keep them idle.
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There is nothing, Sir, too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.
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Those authors who would find many readers, must endeavour to please while they instruct.
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Who drives fat oxen should himself be fat.
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There can be no friendship without confidence, and no confidence without integrity.
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Though it is evident, that not more than one age or people can deserve the censure of being more averse from learning than any other, yet at all times knowledge must have encountered impediments, and wit been mortified with contempt, or harassed with persecution.
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Nothing has tended more to retard the advancement of science than the disposition in vulgar minds to vilify what they cannot comprehend.
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Milton, Madam, was a genius that could cut a Colossus from a rock but could not carve heads upon cherry-stones.
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Virtue is too often merely local.
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Most men are more willing to indulge in easy vices than to practise laborious virtues.
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Authors and lovers always suffer some infatuation, from which only absence can set them free.
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You cannot, by all the lecturing in the world, enable a man to make a shoe.
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